"Prevailing measures of relative poverty put an implausibly high weight on relative deprivation, such that measured poverty does not fall when all incomes grow at the same rate. This stems from the (implicit) assumption in past measures that very poor people incur a negligible cost of social...

New tools allow one to study the incidence of economic growth by initial level of income, and to measure the rate of pro-poor growth in an economy. An application is provided using data for China in the 1990s